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A GLANCE AT 

CURRENT 

AMERICAN HISTORY 



BY 



AN EX-CONFEDERATE. 



Glen Allen, Va. 

CussoNS, May & Company, 
1S97. 



A GLANCE 



AT 




T 





BY 



AN EX-CONFEDERATE. 



(-^^4^^^^,!^?>^■ 



Glen Allen, Va. 

CussoNS, May & Company, 

1897. 



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5 A GLANCE AT 

CURRENT mimiX fflSTORY 



A^-V 



On the general merits, or rather demerits, of The 
South it is quite evident that the outside world has 
made up its mind. 

The " accepted fable " or " distillation of rumors " 
which we call History, has fully crystallized, and there 
is not the least ground for supposing that there will 
be any revision of the judgment already pronounced. 

For two-and-thirty years our Northern friends have 
deprecated any allusion on our part to the causes or 
character of the war, assuring us that every impulse 
of manhood and every throb of patriotism demanded 
that we should bury the past, with all its illusive 
hopes and unavailing griefs, and bend our undivided 
energies to the upbuilding of a common country. And 
that is precisely the thing which we have been doing. 

Meantime, during those same two-and-thirty years, 
those Northern friends of ours have been diligent in a 
systematic distortion of the leading facts of American 
history — inventing, suppressing, perverting, without 
scruple or shame — until our Southland stands to-day 
pilloried to the scorn of all the world and bearing on 
her front the brand of every infamy. 

This has been accomplished not alone nor chiefly by 
historic narrative or formal record but rather by the 



4 A Glance at Current 

persistent use, at all times and on all occasions, of 
every form and mode of unfriendly expression — in pul- 
pit and on platform, at lyceum and on the hustings, by 
picture and story, by essay and song, by sedate disquisi- 
tion and airy romance, and in a general way by the 
unwearied false coloring of all past and current events. 
And thus it has come to pass that in the popular mind 
her very name has become an embodiment of folly, a 
symbol of meanness, a proverb of utter and incurable 
inefficiency. The economist with a principle to illus- 
trate, the moralist full of his Nemesian philosophy, the 
dramatist in quest of poetic justice — in short every 
craftsman of tongue or pen with a moral to point or 
a tale to adorn turns instinctively to this mythical, 
this fiction-created South, and finds the thing he seeks. 

The world has decided against us, and there remains 
to us now but a single hope — the hope of winning and 
holding something better than a dishonored place in 
the hearts of our own children. And even this hope, 
modest yet none the less precious, is fading away as 
the days go by. A wise and philosophical historian 
has justly said that " a people which takes no pride 
in the noble achievements of a remote ancestry will 
never achieve anything worthy to be remembered by 
remote descendants." Truer words were never spoken. 
And yet our grandchildren, trained in the public 
schools, often mingle with their affection an indefinable 
pity, a pathetic sorrow — solacing us with their caresses 
while vainly striving to forget " our crimes." A bright 
little girl climbs into the old veteran's lap, and hug- 
ging him hard and kissing his gray hairs, exclaims : 
" I don't care, grandpa, if you were an old rebel ! I 
love you ! I love you ! " 

But there is to be an end of this. The Grand Army 
of the Republic has spoken. And ever since the war 
ended that army has been a potential force. Nothing 



American History. 5 

more is to be said in palliation of the rebels or the re- 
bellion — no word of comfort, no plea of sympathy. 
Confederates are always to be described as " insurrec- 
tionists " who sought to destroy the Government. The 
existing histories are to be expurgated. Every 
tribute to Southern heroism is to be blotted out, and 
the sum total of martial glory is to be transferred to 
the Grand Army of the Republic by virtue of its own 
decree. 

This plan has doubtless many advantages. It seems 
to settle hard questions so easily. Military fame is 
illusive, and if it comes not by gage of battle there is 
really nothing more natural than to invoke it by other 
means. And our Northern friends have chosen wisely. 
If the three tailors of Tooley street could achieve un- 
dying renown by putting forth a mere preamble, what 
may not the Grand Army of the Republic accomplish 
by writing down a solid column of resolutions? They 
have labored long and arduously, but have at last hit 
the mark. We admire their perseverance, their ver- 
satility, and most of all we felicitate them on their 
success in giving a new meaning to the old aphorism 
that " the pen is mightier than the sword." 

The United States History which to-day enjoys the 
widest circulation and the highest fame is the recent 
work of GoLDWiN Smith, Doctor of Canon Law and 
Professor of the Humanities, Toronto, Canada. 

The learned author has gathered his inspiration, 
and what he calls his facts, from many sources, enu- 
merating by title no less than twenty-two authorities, 
and adding that a complete list would be out of pro- 
portion to the size of the book itself. And yet there 
is absolutely nothing to indicate that he has troubled 
himself with more than one side of his subject. He 
makes no allusion of any kind to any writer who has 
extended his investigations in the faintest degree be- 



6 A Glance at Current 

yond the beaten paths of Northern historical ortho- 
doxy. There is not a fragment of reference to Sage's 
colossal work, or the scholarly monograph of Curry, or 
the vivid picturings of Maury, or the comprehensive 
exposition of Stephens, or the philosophical review of 
Ropes, or indeed any citation whatever which can in- 
spire a reasonable hope of the slightest tendency to- 
ward impartial treatment. 

Mr. Goldwin Smith however is something more than 
a mere Doctor of Canon Law and Professor of the Hu- 
manities. He takes high rank among the masters of 
political economy, and surely not without abundant 
reason, for the skill with which he has adapted his 
wares to his market is beyond all praise. 

His book is published both at New York and Lon- 
don and is intended, he informs us, " for English rath- 
er than American readers;" nevertheless it has become 
amazingly popular with our brethren throughout the 
North. 

The general plan of his work is an unsparing vil- 
lification of the South. This wins for him Northern 
plaudits, and amid the gleeful tumult he weaves in his 
sneers and gibes on America at large, and thus opens 
a second market for his books among his own class of 
delighted Britishers. 

South Carolina, he says, made her start by combin- 
ing " buccaneering with slave owning " and utilized 
her ports by making them a shelter for pirates and 
corsairs " such as Captain Kidd and Blackbeard." 

Georgia he deals with more leniently. Her people 
were not distinctly criminal but just languidly and 
lazily vicious — shiftless, drunken and beggarly. She 
became " the refuge of the pauper and the bankrupt." 
Her first settlers were " good-for-nothings who had failed 
in trade" — a •' shiftless and lazy set " who " called for 
rum;" but later on "better elements came in, High- 



American History. 7 

landers, Moravians, and some of the persecuted protes- 
tants of Salzburg." 

But Virginia seems to be his especial aversion. 
From the very beginning it has been her misfortune 
to awaken within him the most distressing emotions. 
He says she was not started right ; that her first set- 
tlers were an unpromising lot — lackeys, beggars, bro- 
ken-down gentlemen, tapsters out of a job. And things 
went from bad to worse. " To the crew of vagabonds 
were afterwards added jail-birds." * * << Convicts 
were offered their choice between the gallows and Vir- 
ginia, and some were wise enough to choose the gal- 
lows." They were not nice. Their aims were low, 
their motives sordid, their very place of settlement has 
long been a desolation, and only fragments of ruin 
mark its site.' 

Such is the forbidding background of Mr. Goldwin 
Smith's historical picture when he begins to light it 
up with the luminous glories of the Plymouth settle- 
ment. The Pilgrims, he assures us, were an altogether 
different kind of people. There was nothing sordid 
about them, nothing grovelling, nothing base. Their 
pure hearts were too full of simple faith and holy zeal 
to afford room for corrupting influences or worldly 
desires. " Some sustaining motive higher than gain 
was necessary to give them victory in their death- 
struggle with nature, to enable them to make a new 
home for themselves in the wilderness, and to found a 
nation." 

It was not only during the early period of coloniza- 
tion that the New Englanders were superior to the 
Virginians. The distinction seems to have widened as 
time went on. " Though no longer gold seekers, the 
men of Virginia were not such colonists as the Puri- 
tans. They were more akin in character to the Span- 
iard on the south of them, who made the Indian work 



8 A Glance at Current 

for him, than to the New Englander, who worked for 
himself." * * "To work for them they had from 
the first a number of indentured servants, or bonds- 
men, jail-birds, many of them ; some kidnapped by 
press gangs in the streets of London, all of depraved 
character." * * * « Afterwards came in ever- 
increasing volume African slavery, the destined bane 
of Virginia and her ultimate ruin. Thus were formed 
the three main orders of Virginia society : The planter 
oligarchy, the ' mean white trash,' and the negro 
slaves." And so for two hundred years she plodded 
on, unredeemed, her " poor whites " being hopelessly 
given over to "a barbarous and debased existence." 

As were the people so were their leaders. " A chief 
fomenter of the quarrel" [with England] "was Patrick 
Henry, a man who had tried many ways of earning a 
livelihood, and had failed in all." * * * "A 
bankrupt at twenty-three, he lounged in thriftless idle- 
ness, till he found that tho he could not live by 
industry he could live by his eloquent tongue." 

This is the Goldwin Smith idea incarnate. It is the 
Boston idea, the Puritan idea. The logical New Eng- 
land brain would formulate and demonstrate the propo- 
sition thus : 

1. Patrick Henry, furnished with a good stock of 
groceries, failed at twenty-three. 

2. A Puritan, even of the tenth magnitude, under 
like circumstances, would not fail at twenty-three. 

Ergo : A tenth-rate Puritan is the superior of Pat- 
rick Henry. 

Such are tho limitations of the New England mind. 
Under the law of its very being it is fettered by its 
single standard of worth, and is therefore qualified to 
pass judgment only on those subjects which by it are 
measurable or deemed worthy of measurement. Its su- 



American History. 9 

preme test of merit is accumulation ; the capacity to 
amass. 

As a student of natural history our author has been 
taught that the eagle is without a rival in range of 
vision and strength of wing. And yet the busy mag- 
pie in half an hour will spy out and store away more 
bits of glass and shining beads and glittering trumpery 
of every sort than the Bird of Jove will be likely to 
get together in a score of years. Mr. Goldwin Smith 
does not seem to make proper allowance for diflfer- 
ences in instinct. 

A generous foe, a member of the aristocratic order 
which Henry so fiercely assailed, sees in the young 
Virginian something other than " a shiftless idler " 
and " a lounging bankrupt." The poet-peer felicitously 
presents him to all nations and to all ages as " the 
forest-born Demosthenes " — the standard-bearer of a 
brave people, outraged by unendurable wrongs, yet 
resolute to transmit to their posterity the liberties 
which were their birthright. 

With that prescience which is the heaven-bestowed 
gift of genius the young patriot clearly discerned the 
signs of the times. He foresaw the real nature of that 
tempest which was fast gathering throughout the civi- 
lized globe. He knew that tho the world for two cen- 
turies had been awakening from its lethargy of a thou- 
sand years, yet that the time was only then ripening 
for mankind's deliverance. Instead of minding his 
shop, as Mr. Goldwin Smith would have done ; instead 
of consecrating himself heart and soul to movements in 
the tallow trade or fluctuations in the calico market, 
he gave his brilliant intellect free range through the 
whole cycle of human knowledge, and summed up the 
situation of the hour with a precision and comprehen- 
siveness which is still the marvel of statists and histo- 
rians and political philosophers. 



10 A Glance at Current 

He saw the forces of tyranny marshalling themselves 
on every hand against the spirit of liberty, and he 
saw that the spirit of liberty was everywhere the spirit 
of the age. He foretold the nature of the coming 
struggle, with its burden of grief for every home in 
Western Europe. He heard the tread of mighty ar- 
mies and the sorrowing cry of oppressed multitudes ; 
a cry which was soon to change its accent and pre- 
cipitate that frightful conflict which shook the earth. 
The hour was approaching when monarchs and priests 
and conquerers must unite to try conclusions in a 
death grapple with the awakened peoples — an hour 
when the new world might sever the ligatures which 
bound it to the old — an hour when America by one 
bold stroke might fling off" the ancient traditions which 
else would forever entrammel her with the abuses and 
superstitions bf a despotic and benighted past. 

It was for the work of that hour that Patrick Henry 
was born. 

The informed historian discerns in him, not the 
" storm petrel of revolution " but the defender of in- 
herited liberties. He came at a moment when free 
institutions were trembling in the balance. The old 
theory of kingly right to govern wrong was being again 
asserted. The illimitable and unchecked right to tax 
was declared in the very terms which had demanded 
benevolences and ship-money. Lord North and the 
Earl of Bute and George the Third had formed a 
triune of despotism which bore every mark of the 
despotism of Straff"ord and Laud and Charles the First. 
And it was the lot of Patrick Henry at that crucial 
moment to lead the forlorn hope of constitutional 
liberty just as John Hampden had led it, under the 
same conditions, a hundred years before. 

It is nothing to the purpose that the colonies won 
their independence, their Statehood, a few years before 



American History. n 

the coming of the grand catastrophe. Their action was 
simply the first episode of the mighty drama. The 
prize battled for was the boon of civil liberty ; the 
people interested were the civilized nations; and it 
was needful that the first blow should come from the 
western hemisphere. And it is the glory of the man that 
his genius discerned the end from the beginning. 
That he saw in the approaching downfall of crown and 
scepter and mitre and crozier and all the infinite par- 
aphernalia of old world oppression, mankind's best 
hope for the new world's deliverance. And so amidst 
the first mutterings of the storm which was to culmi- 
nate in universal wreckage -amidst the portents which 
prefigured the vision of tottering thrones and shattered 
dynasties and crumbling empires, he upheld the brave 
faith that then and there might be laid, broad and 
deep, the enduring foundations of the temple of Ameri- 
can liberty. 

It is safe to say that throughout his entire work 
Mr. Goldwin Smith never calls the name of a Vir- 
ginian without bestowing upon him the tribute of his 
scorn. 

If sometimes he seems to praise Washington it is 
only that he may be the better able to mark, by force 
of contrast, the worth) essness of his followers and the 
badness of his cause. 

" Without him," says the author, that cause " would 
have been ten times lost," and " the names of those 
who had drawn the country into the conflict would 
have gone down to posterity linked with defeat and 
shame." Still, continues the author, " we can hardly 
number among great captains a general who acted on 
so small a scale," one who " never won a battle," and 
whose final success after all "was due not to native 
valor but to foreign aid." The chief merit which he 
grants to Washington was "his calmness and self- 



12 A Glance at Current 

trol in contending with the folly and dishonesty of 
Congress and the fractioiisness of the State militia." 
As a commentary on the times he quotes a casual 
remark of Governeur Morris: "'Jay,' ejaculated Gov- 
erneur Morris thirty years afterwards, ' what a lot of 

d d scoundrels we had in that second Congress ! ' 

'Yes,' said Jay, 'we had,' and he knocked the ashes 
from his pipe." In a nation where all are blind, a 
one-eyed man will be king. And such is substantially 
the distinction which Mr. Goldwin Smith accords to 
George Washington. 

James Madison, one of the most eminent and blame- 
less statesmen of any age or nation, is curtly dismissed 
as " a well-meaning man, but morally weak." 

Henry Clay, orator, patriot, pacificator — passionately 
beloved by his friends and honored even by his politi- 
cal opponents — devoted beyond all else to the welfare 
of his country, and ever ready to make any sacrifice 
at the shrine of an unbroken Union — who Curtius-like 
flung himself time and again into the abysses of sec- 
tional discord, and whose whole life was a concordance 
of the placid words he spoke when informed of his 
political defeat, "it is better to be right than presi- 
dent ;" — this man, able, pure, magnanimous, generous 
in his ambitions, avowed in his convictions, steadfast 
in his aims, true to his friends, charitable to his oppo- 
nents, flexible in expedients yet firm as the primal 
rocks where principle was involved ; — this man, the 
latchet of whose shoes his accuser is not worthy to 
unloose, is flippantly denounced as a mere " political 
acrobat," a " dazzling but artful politician who owed 
his fall to a false step in the practice of his own art." 

John Randolph had " natural ability " but lacked 
"good sense" and had "no power of self-control." * 
* * " With the arrogance of his class he would 



American History. 13 

enter the Senate with his hunting whip in his hand, 
and behave as if he were in his kennel." 

The "behavior" of Virginians seems indeed to be a 
subject of ever-recurring solicitude with Mr. Goldwin 
Smith. As an instructor of youth he doubtless made 
a specialty of "deportment" and now gives to the 
world the benefit of his training. He makes the cus- 
tomary fling at " plantation manners," but is mildly 
surprised that "Franklin and Samuel Adams" should 
have been "lacking in the ordinary traits of gentle- 
men." As for Patrick Henry nothing better was to be 
expected, since " the character of an English gentle- 
man " is not to be formed " on a plantation or in the 
backwoods," — an opinion by the way which is any- 
thing but English if we exclude such authorities as 
the distinguished author, the 'Arrys and 'Arriotts of 
Bow Bells, and the eminently resj^ectable contingent of 
Servants' Hall. 

The only American that Mr. Goldwin Smith seems 
to hold in real regard is General Benedict Arnold. 
"Arnold," he says, "was one of the best of the Amer- 
ican commanders and perhaps the most daring of them 
all." * * * << jjg .^g^g slighted and wronged 

by the politicians," and " seems to have despaired of 
the cause." As a patriot "he shrank from the idea 
of the French alliance." He believed " that France 
had designs on Canada." Under those circumstances 
he resolved to enact the role of General Monk, and 
to that end opened negotiations with the British com- 
mander. 



In his treatment of incident the author is no less 
buoyant and free-handed than in his judgment of char- 
acter. He has no prejudices; no bias. All kinds of 
knowledge are equally welcome ; all sources of infor- 



14 A Glance at Current 

mation equally meritorious. Any rumor of the camp, 
any scrap of idle gossip, any stray vagary of the news- 
paper correspondent, so it meets his needs, is accounted 
proper pabulum for the Muse of History. 

Here are a few of his utterances, taken almost at 
random : 

" Jefferson Davis when captured " was " farcically 
disguised in woman's clothes." 

" The slaveholders escaped military service while they 
thrust the poor under fire." 

" Confederate prisoners were well fed, and suffered 
no hardships." * * * "If many of them died 
it was because the caged eagle dies." 

" Guards pressed men in the streets " of Southern 
cities, and " conscripts were seen going to Lee's army 
in chains." 

The Southern clergy were " not only ignorant but 
cringing and degraded." 

" Jackson was nicknamed ' Stonewall ' " because of 
his steadfastness " on a field of general panic." 

Wilkes Booth was " a ranting Virginia actor " who 
drew his inspiration from " the tyrannicide motto of 
his State." 

" At the taking of Fort Pillow the negroes were 
nailed to logs and burned alive." 

" Copperheads were so called from a reptile which 
waits on the rattlesnake, the rattlesnake being em- 
blamatic of the South." 

" The Northern press, unlike the slave press of the 
South, never misled the people by publishing false 
news of military successes." 

"The Southern lady was but the head of a harem." 
She " might be soft, elegant, and charming, tho there 
was an element in her character of a different kind, 
which civil war disclosed." 

Slanders and perversions such as these seem unwor- 



American History. 15 

thy of serious refutation. They arouse loathing rather 
than resentment. And so amid our unutterable and 
unuttered contempt they generally escape rebuke. Yet 
the world believes them. It is nothing that many of 
these fables are foolish and incredible in themselves. 
It is nothing that they are false to nature, false to fact, 
false to the canons of fiction. It is nothing that they 
confute each other. It is nothing that they would be 
mutually destructive if they met, for they are scattered 
throughout many pages and are digested singly. 

Frightful stories are told of horrible torture inflicted 
by Southerners on their hapless prisoners. And charm- 
ing pastorals are written on the lovingkindness of the 
Northern people as manifested by their beneficent treat- 
ment of the captives in their hands. And yet when 
Mr. Goldwin Smith is confronted by the oflicial prison 
records on each side — when it is conclusively shown 
that the death rate in Northern prisons exceeded the 
death rate in Southern prisons by nearly eight per 
cent. — the versatile author has his ready reason : "If 
many of them died it was because the caged eagle 
dies." 

This in a sense is true, and is a just tho unconscious 
tribute to the soldiery of the South. Many of them 
did die as the caged eagle dies. They did beat out 
their hearts against the prison bars. Their spirits at 
last did sink — their eyes, dauntless in battle, did grow 
dim — and so, still unsubdued, their pulses ceased at 
last to beat, and only their mortal clay remained to 
those who could destroy their bodies but could not 
quell their souls. 

The fidelity of the Confederate captive is without a 
parallel in human history. At any hour of any day 
freedom was his on the simple condition of swearing 
allegiance to the "Government of the United States." 

But what was the mood of this Southern soldier — 



16 A Glance at Current 

this scion of a race of freemen — this bold spirit who 
under duress " dies as the caged eagle dies.;" what was 
his mood of mind while he was being dragged " to 
Lee's army in chains ? " Where then were beak and 
claw and strength of wing ? And with what sort of 
thrusting instrument did the " shirking slaveowners " 
" thrust him under fire ? " And how many chained 
eagles could one thruster thrust forward at a time?" 
Or rather, perhaps, how many "shirking slaveholders" 
would be required to "thrust under fire" a single 
eagle, chained or unchained ? 

And is not the South entitled to some set-oflf" against 
the North on the score of this special cause of death ? 
Was it only on one side that the vital spark was 
quenched by loss of liberty ? Did no imprisoned 
Northern soldier "die as the caged eagle dies?" Would 
each and all have been happy and contented if " well 
fed" and sheltered from "hardship?" Was it the 
Southern soldier alone who had none but moral griefs, 
while the Northern soldier had only material ones ? 
And must indeed these mixed and incongruous state- 
ments be blindly accepted as articles of faith lest the 
"sacred interests of a broad and generous patriotism" 
be impaired ? 

The author's argument is that the Southern captive, 
amid boundless abundance, pined and died, yearning 
for liberty, while the imprisoned Northerner had no 
thought or care beyond his need of food and shelter, 
thus proving the former to have been of the earth 
earthy, and the latter to have been spiritual in a 
super-sublimated degree. 

It seems a little hard on the unilluminated that they 
should be expected to digest this sort of reasoning. 
Yet perhaps they ought to take such logic as they can 
get, and be thankful for it, inasmuch as the sacred 
right of might is hard to vindicate unless facts can be 



American History. 17 

moulded into harmony with the general hypothesis that 
the South is a region of savagery and the North a 
centre of civilization. 

Here are a few more extracts from this " latest and 
best" of American histories: 

It was a contest between " an iron despotism " on 
the one hand and " spontaneous zeal " on the other. 

" The South, almost from the first, resorted to con- 
scription, ruthlessly enforced by the severest penalties," 
a course " from which Northern democracy shrank." 

" The South had the superiority of force which 
autocracy lends to war," while " the North had the 
advantage of the unforced efforts and sacrifices which 
free patriotism makes." 

And as conclusive proof of the invincible strength 
which " spontaneous zeal " and the " unforced efforts " 
of " free patriotism " confer upon " a popular govern- 
ment " the author might aptly have called attention 
to the memorable interview between the British Min- 
ister and the Hon. William H. Seward : 

" I can touch a bell at my right hand," said the 
Secretary of State, " and order the arrest of a citizen 
of Ohio ; I can touch the bell again, and order the 
arrest of a citizen of New York. Can Queen Victoria 
do as much?" 

Lord Lyons, with closed eyes, slowly and silently 
shook his head. Yet he might have replied : " It is 
true, Mr. Secretary, that my sovereign, in this our 
modern age, has not the authority which you so justly 
claim; nor indeed had his puissant majesty, George the 
Third ; yet I doubt not that some such proof of power 
might possibly have been given in the good old days 
of Henry the Eighth." 

The liberty of the press is also a subject on which 



18 A Glance at Current 

our author grows eloquent — holding that in the North 
it was absolutely free, while in the South it was but 
" a sounding board " to register the decrees of tyi'anny. 
On topics of this class it is really difficult to judge 
whether or not Mr. Goldwin Smith is writing in good 
faith. The feeling constantly arises that there is a sly 
sarcasm, a lurking irony in his praises of the North. 
In the blandest manner he lays down broad proposi- 
tions which are not only destitute of truth but which 
are specifically and in detail the exact reverse of truth. 

Every Northern man who lived through the war 
knows that under the Lincoln government there was 
no such thing as freedom of the press. It is tiue that 
before mobbing or destroying that palladium of liberty 
the "truly loyal" would lash themselves into a state 
of moral exaltation by denouncing as " rebel sympa- 
thisers" all who dared to remind them of their cov- 
enanted obligations — all who dared to appeal to the 
Constitution of the United States. And so, from the 
great cities on the Atlantic coast to the little villages 
on the Western frontier, every opponent of radicalism, 
every supporter of Statehood, every democratic editor 
who failed to raise the abject squeak that he was " a 
war-democrat " was forthwith denounced as an " enemy 
to free institutions, " and patriotically raided, robbed, 
muzzled and terrorized until crushed out of existence 
or brought into a loyal frame of mind. 

Now turn to the South. During the whole life of 
the Confederacy her press was absolutely free. Even 
when confronted by the united hosts of Europe, Asia, 
and Africa — even when beset by tenfold numbers and 
by resources mounting up to ten times ten — from the 
beginning to the end — through all mutations of victory 
or defeat — no matter what her ^^ower or what her 
needs, the Confederate government, by special enact- 
ment, gave absolute exemption from military service 



American History. 19 

to every individual who was in any way connected 
with her newspaper press. 

" A sounding board," indeed ! Read the editorials 
of the chief newspaper published at her capital — the 
editorials of the Richmond Examiner. They have 
been republished in book form since the war and may 
be easily obtained. The editor was John M. Daniel — 
a man of note — able, haughty, resolute ; a recluse bit- 
ter with the bitterness of misanthropy yet devoured 
by an insatiable ambition. Crossed by some one in 
authority, he assailed the sanctities of bureaucracy and 
then drifted into antagonism with Mr. Davis' entire 
administration. The breach was never healed, and 
from the beginning to the end of the war he searched 
out and gave to open day every blot and every error 
of every department of the Confederate government. 
Never since the days of Sir Philip Francis had mortal 
hand grasped a more trenchant pen, and never was 
the work of a single pen fraught with more momen- 
tous consequences. Under the Lincoln despotism a 
writer such as Daniel could not have held his liberty 
a single day. 

So much for the "autocracy" which lent the South 
her " superiority " in " war." So much for the " iron 
despotism " which, notwithstanding autocracy, was over- 
thrown by the " spontaneous zeal " of the North. 

Does not Mr. Goldwin Smith know that he is giving 
his readers either pointless sarcasm or utter rubbish? 
Does he not know that the facts are notoriously and 
demonstrably the exact reverse of what he states them 
to be? 

Again, the author says that " the South, almost from 
the first, resorted to conscription, ruthlessly enforced 
by the severest penalties, " a course " from which 
Northern democracy shrank." 

Does he not know that the Northern conscription 



20 A Glance at Current 

was as savage and remorseless as that of the invaded 
country was orderly and mild ? Does he not know 
that what the "spontaneous" patriots really "shrank" 
from was the decoys and trepanners who filled the 
union-saving ranks at so much per union-saver ? Does 
he not know that on a single occasion, and in the 
streets of a single Northern city, more than a thousand 
recusant patriots were shot down like mad dogs while 
flying in terror before the crimps and kidnappers and 
press-gangs of the Lincoln government ? 

But we bid adieu to Mr. Goldwin Smith. He, in 
turn, is to be set aside. He is altogether too mild a 
spoken man to meet present demands. His vitupera- 
tion of the " rebels " falls short in acrimony, while his 
adulation of the yankees lacks the required unction. 
("Rebel" and "Yankee" — how pat as echo the one 
term calls forth the other.") 

The history committee of the Grand Army of the 
Republic has finally settled on a definite plan. And 
the plan in some respects is so full of promise that it 
will doubtless be adopted. The aim is two-fold — to 
render the rebel more odious than history has thus far 
depicted him, and at the same time to put the yankee 
in such a position that the world will be compelled to 
admire him ! 

For the attainment of so patriotic an end surely 
nothing more should be needed than the Grand Army's 
simple requisition. The needful appropriation might 
be graced by a paean or two to the old flag, and all 
should go smoothly. Else, what is the good of victory 
and victory's lawful fruits ? — fame, wealth, honor, rep- 
utation, and full control of "history's purchased page?" 

The proposed plan is official, governmental, authori- 
tative. The required history is to be written by a 
duly appointed and truly loyal personage who is to 
gather his war material solely from the " dispatches " 



American History. 21 

on file at Washington. But right there, we apprehend, 
will be found the fly in the ointment. 

Think of it. History by the transcription of yankee 
dispatches ! Unhappy historian ! — the wings of his 
imagination close clipped, and himself bound by both 
literary and patriotic obligation to harmonize with the 
actual situation, and with each other, the varied dis- 
patches of commanders who " never misled the people 
by publishing false news of military successes." 

Take a handful of the most important dispatches of 
the war. Or, still better, take the chief dispatches of 
the Grand Army's chosen heroes — the radical republi- 
can generals, the men of immaculate loyalty, the gleam- 
ing meteors of war — Benjamin Butler, Banks, Hooker, -i 
Pope, 0. 0. Howard. 

Turn to Hooker's dispatch when he had Lee " at his 
mercy : " " The enemy must attack us in our chosen 
position, or ingloriously fly!" The enemy did not fly, 
but it attacked ; whereupon the gallant corps of 0. 0. 
Howard marched out of history with unexampled 
celerity, while the exultant dispatch-bearer spurred hard 
for Washington with Stonewall's troopers at his heels. 
Butler's dispatches are a vibrating note of triumph 
from Big Bethel in '61 to Bermuda Hundred in '64. 
The former aff"air was really a drawn battle, the two 
wings of his army having fired into each other until 
mutually satisfied, when they simultaneously retired. 
Butler claimed it as a double victory, but history has 
not allowed the claim. In his Bermuda campaign he 
announced his position as being " impregnable against 
any numbers which the rebels might bring against 
him." A narrow space between the rivers was the 
only point of entrance or exit. So Beauregard with 
a handful of troops turned the position against him, 
or " bottled him up," as Grant expressed it, and But- 
ler, as a warrior, was heard from no more. 



22 A Glance at Current 

General Banks was pre-eminently distinguished as a 
dispatch writer, whether waging war amid the cotton 
bales of the Red River or " chasing the rebels " in the 
Valley of Virginia. But his campaigns were peculiar, 
being modeled on the maritime principle of fighting 
in a circle, so that whenever he overtook the rebels 
he was pretty sure to find them busy among his wagon 
trains. The hungry Confederates held him in affec- 
tionate regard and generally spoke of him as " Old 
Stonewall's Commissary," altho in his dispatches he 
modestly forbore to mention the rank they gave him. 

General Pope was also famous for his dispatches, 
and never were those dispatches more aglow with vic- 
.-tory than whilst he was being spanked and booted 
from the Rappahannock to the walls of Washington. 
At the very moment that he was declaring the rebels 
to be in headlong flight, the General-in-Chief, Halleck, 
frantic with terror, was imploring McClellan to force 
his marches and save the Capital ! 

Truly, this official history will be worth the waiting 
for. Particularly as the historian is to be put under 
orders to arrange the dispatches " patriotically ;" that 
is, in such shape as to debase the rebel and exalt the 
yankee ! 

And yet this subject lias its sad side too. The 
" History " will have its vogue, everybody will want 
to read it, but during that lively jicriod what will the 
poor comic papers do ? 

Those friends of the Grand Army wlio have a sense 
of humor are apprehensive tliat that patriotic body is 
in danger of being laughed out of existence. And in 
this emergency it is proposed to enlarge the powers of 
Government so that a new code of laws may be en- 
acted — laws which shall make it a penal offence to 
speak with levity of patriotic persons, or to utter re- 
proachful or contemptuous or irreverent words when 



American History. 23 

speaking of any project whicli enjoys the support of 
"loyal" men. A "truthful history" is to be ordert^d 
"by act of Congress," and " ji^ublishers are to be fined 
and imprisoned" if they "issue works" wliich are cal- 
culated " to wrongly impress the minds of the growing 
generation regarding the Rebellion." 

Considered as an emanation of the Puritan spirit, all 
this is perfectly logical. He cares not who fights his 
battles so that he alone is left to record them. That 
has always been a Puritan j^i'erogative, and he does 
not propose to abandon it. He has laid aside his 
steeple hat and his sour visage and his sad-colored 
raiment, but at bottom he is the same old Puritan. 
He has dropped his sanctimonious snutHe and the up- 
ward turning of his eyes because he began to perceive 
that those outward signs of inward grace were putting 
the unregenerate on their guard against him. But he 
is still the genuine article. A Pharisee always, he is 
not to be judged by any common standard; for a being 
of his lofty pretentions, if not incomparably better than 
other men, is bound to be immeasurably worse. Mov- 
ing ci-aftily to his ends, now with a flash of simulated 
zeal and anon with a placid saintliness, but always 
disguising his tyranny and greed by special claims to 
holiness, he is, in all essentials, the same being to-day 
that he was when England vomited him forth to the 
Continent and when the Continent in turn spewed him 
to the shores of the New World. 

Self-styled as the apostle of liberty and peace, he 
has never neglected an opportunity to strangle the one 
and subvert the other. Self-appointed as the champion 
of unity and harmony, he has carried discord into 
every land that his foot has smitten. Exalting himself 
as the defender of freedom of thought, his favorite 
practice has been to muzzle the press and to adjourn 
legislatures with the sword. Vaunting himself as the 



24 A Glance at Current 

only true disciple of the living God, lie has done more 
to bring sacred things into disrepute than has been 
accomplished by all the apostates and infidels of all 
the ages, from Judas Iscariot to Robert G. Ingersoll. 
Born in revolt against law and order — breeding schism 
in the Church and faction in the State — seceding from 
every organization to which he had pledged fidelity — 
nullifying all law, human and divine, which lacked 
the seal of his approval — evermore setting up what he 
calls his conscience against the most august of consti- 
tuted authorities and the most sacred of covenanted 
obligations, he yet has the impregnable conceit to pose 
himself in the world's eye as the only surviving speci- 
men of political or moral perfection. 

On two occasions he has been clothed, for a brief 
period, with absolute power, and in each instance he 
taught his victims what " persecution " really meant. 
In the tide of time, men have been governed in many 
ways — by councils and oligarchies — by prophets, priests 
and kings — by the despotism of tyrants and the des- 
potism of mobs — by fools and philosophers, by learned 
sages and by savage chieftains — but they knew not 
the meaning of tyranny until they fell under the 
Puritan dominion, and learned what it was to be gov- 
erned by a brood of liberty-seeking saints and vanity- 
inspired busybodies. 

"Be you a witch?" roared the embodied majesty of 
Massachusetts to a trembling paralytic. 

" No, your honor," was the reply. 

" Ofiicer," said the Court, " take her away and pull 
out her toe-nails with a pair of hot pincers, and then 
see what she says ; for verily it is declared that ' thou 
shalt not suflfer a witch to live !' " 

Thus with the act of cruelty or rapine goes ever the 
perverted text. 

" We were an hungered, and the salvages had much 



American History. 25 

store of corn, and many garments made of the skins 
of beasts, and it came to pass that we went forth and 
fell upon them, smiting them hip and thigh, even with 
the knife of Ehud and the hammer of Jael, crying 
aloud and sparing not, and their spoil became an heri- 
tage unto us, even unto us and our children." 

This precious screed, which serves its turn in sancti- 
fying robbery and murder, is in fair accord with that 
practical and profitable tenet which has so often been 
to him a rule of action : " Thou hast said in Thy 
Word that ' unto the saints should be given the earth 
and the fulness thereof,' and verily we are the saints." 

That the press should be silenced at his bidding, 
that courts should be reconstructed and constitutions 
tossed aside, is simply a necessity of the situation. 
The men of Belial must be put down. 

Under ordinary circumstances there should seem to 
be no particular harm in men speaking of facts which 
they had witnessed, or in describing events in which 
they had participated, or in recording the history 
which they had made. 

But the Puritan has always been a law unto himself, 
and by virtue of his superior toleration he has now 
become a law unto others. Moreover being guided by 
that inner light which shines for him alone, there must 
be no appeal from the justice of his judgments or the 
righteousness of his decrees. 

The Puritan heretofore has made some little amends 
by furnishing to mankind an enduring target for scorn 
and mirth and derision. But now we are to be de- 
prived of even that slight compensation — the poor 
privilege of laughing at him. It is too bad. 

We read that the Roman tyrant, Aurelius Commo- 
dus, " entered the arena, sword in hand, against a 
wretched gladiator who was armed only with a foil of 
lead, and that after shedding the blood of his helpless 



26 A Glance at Current 

victim, he struck medals to commemorate the inglori- 
ous victory." 

That fame at any price was precious in the sight of 
Aurelius is sufficiently evident, yet we nowhere read 
that he forbade his people to laugh or weep or jibe at 
his novel way of attaining it, and it is quite certain 
that he left them at liberty to stamp on their own 
account as many medals as they might have occasion 
for. 



On the general subject of State Sovereignty, and its 
relation to secession and nullification, it is well enough 
to set down a few facts which the coming history will 
doubtless fail to remember. And if the facts seem 
" calculated to wrongly impress the minds of the grow- 
ing generation" why "so much the worse for the 
facts." 

That sterling patriot and life-long Unionist, John 
Janney of Loudoun county, was chosen President of 
the Peace Convention of 1861. On being twitted by a 
youthful delegate for his State Sovereignty tendencies, 
the old patriarch said : " Disunion would be the great- 
est calamity that could befall our State. But, sir, 
secession is her lawful right, and she alone must de- 
termine the expediency of exercising it." * * 
" Virginia, sir, is to-day a free and sovereign State ; 



American History. 27 

and she was a nation one hundred and eighty years 
before the Union was born." 

This principle of Statehood had been everywhere 
recognized by Americans up to the time of the war, 
and nowhere more persistently than by the people of 
Massachusetts and the New England States. 

In her convention of 1780 Massachusetts declared 
that her people had the sole and exclusive right of 
governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and inde- 
pendent State, and that they, and they alone, had the 
indefeasible right to institute, reform, alter or totally 
change that government whenever their happiness or 
welfare might seem to require it. 

Thirteen years later, when war with Great Britain 
seemed almost unavoidable, the New Englanders put 
forth Hon. Timothy Dwight as their spokesman, and 
through him declared that they would have no part or 
lot in such a war, and sooner than have it forced upon 
them they would go out of the Union. 

So, too, when the Louisiana purchase was under dis- 
cussion. Massachusetts bitterly opposed it and threat- 
ened to exercise what she called her " unquestioned 
right of secession " if the measure should be persisted 
in. Senator George Cabot was the leader on that oc- 
casion. 

Indeed, from the very beginning, the New England 
States left nothing untried to prevent the territorial 
growth of our country. In the words of Bancroft, "An 
ineradicable dread of the coming power of the South- 
west lurked in New England, especially in Massachu- 
setts." And if they could have had their way, the 
Mississippi river would now be our western frontier. 

Another distinguished secessionist was Senator Pick- 
ering, also of Massachusetts. He did not like Mr. 
Jefferson's administration at all. There was something 
about it which he said was "not congenial" to his 



28 A Glance at Current 

feelings or the feelings of New England. So he pro- 
posed a general dissolution of the Union with a view 
to the formation of a Northern Confederacy. The 
scheme was favored by New Hampshire, Massachusetts, 
New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont, 
yet it was deemed imprudent to act without the alli- 
ance of New York, who was promised a dominant in- 
fluence in the new league. But New York declined 
with thanks and the project fell through. 

In 1804 the Legislature of Massachusetts asserted and 
defined the principle of secession by the following en- 
actment : " That the annexation of Louisiana to the 
Union transcends the constitutional power of the Gov- 
ernment of the United States. It forms a new Con- 
federacy, to which the States united by the former 
compact are not bound to adhere." 

In the debate on the bill for the admission of 
Louisiana, the representative of Massachusetts, Hon. 
Josiah Quincy, said : "If the bill passes, it is my de- 
liberate judgment that it is virtually a dissolution of 
the Union ; that it will free the States from their moral 
obligation ; and, as it will be the right of all, so it 
will be the duty of some definitely to prepare for a 
separation — amicably if they can, violently if they 
must." At this conjuncture a Southern member raised 
the point that " the suggestion of a dissolution of the 
Union was out of order ; but, on appeal, the House 
sustained Mr. Quincy, who, in an elaborate argument, 
vindicated the rightfulness of secession, saying, among 
other things: "Is there a principle of public law 
better settled or more conformable to the plainest 
suggestions of reason than that the violation of a con- 
tract by one of the parties may be considered as ex- 
empting the other from its obligations? Suppose in 
private life thirteen form a partnership, and ten of 
them undertake to admit a new partner without the 



American History. 29 

concurrence of the other three — would it not be at 
their option to abandon the partnership, after so pal- 
pable an infringement of their rights? 

This reasoning goes to the heart of the matter. It 
asserts that the States are independent political organ- 
isms — or rather that they were so in those anti-bellum 
days — and that all the massed power of majorities 
could not drag down the principle of sovereignty, altho 
that principle might be enthroned in but a single 
State. 

In short, on all occasions of domestic disquiet or 
foreign war the history of New England has been a 
history of revolt, and threatened separation, and nulli- 
fication, and secession, and persistent defiance of the 
authority of Congress and the Federal Courts. 

In 1812 Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to 
allow their militia to be sent beyond their State lines, 
and on being left to their own devises they quarrelled 
with the Administration for refusing to pay them for 
making a local defense on their own account. Mean- 
time the Governor of Massachusetts occupied himself 
in calling a public fast day for deploring the war 
against a nation which had long been " the bulwark 
of the religion we profess." The good old town of 
Plymouth, having risen from its knees, presently got 
into a muscular mood, and having captured one of the 
Congressman who voted for the war, forthwith gave a 
free exhibition of their untrammelled liberty by "kick- 
ing him through the town." 

Finally the Supreme Court of Massachusetts poured 
oil on the troubled waters by deciding that neither 
Congress nor the President had anything to do with 
the State forces, but that the Governor was the man. 
So the Governor settled the matter by refusing the 
request of the President for her quota of troops, and 
the Massachusetts House of Kepresentatives clinched 



30 A Glance at Current 

the whole subject by declaring- the war to be unholy, 
and begging the people to do what they could to 
thwart it. 

Jefferson's Embargo was never really tried, because 
the New England States threatened to secede if its 
provisions should be carried out, and it was accord- 
ingly repealed in the vain hope of appeasing them. 

But it was on the actual breaking out of hostilities 
that New England showed the real quality of her 
" devotion to the Union." She not only did her best 
to nullify every law passed by Congress for raising 
men and money, but some of " her best citizens " 
intrigued with British agents for an alliance with 
Canada, while others hung out signal lights to enable 
the enemy's fleet to capture our disabled cruisers — 
deeds which would have richly deserved the halter if 
committed by ordinary mortals, but which won for 
them the enthusiastic plaudits of their kind. 

That the Hartford Convention of 1814 was not simp- 
ly a secession but a treasonable body admits of no 
rational doubt. The object was not merely to destroy 
the Union, but to enleague the revolted States with 
Grreat Britain, so that the new Confederacy and its 
ally might be in a position to subjugate the adhering 
States. The present race of New England apologists 
pretend that the Convention was " merely an assem- 
blage of some of the Federal leaders," but the plain 
facts of history discredit their claim. The delegates from 
Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were 
regularly elected by the Legislatures of those States, 
and were in every respect an official body acting in a 
representative capacity. Their deliberations were held 
in secret, and no full account of their proceedings has 
ever been published, but they publicly announced their 
adherence to the doctrine of State Sovereignty, full 
and absolute, declaring that : " When emergencies occur 



American History. 31 

which are either beyond the reach of judicial tribunals 
or too pressing to admit of delay incident to their 
forms, States which have no common umpire must be 
their own judges and execute their own decisions." 



In 1861 the Southern people, weary of discord, ex- 
ercised this sovereign right. They withdrew from their 
restless and contentious neighbors, and formed a more 
harmonious Union among themselves, asking only to be 
let alone. The " emergency " which confronted them 
was the enthronement of a hostile and revolutionary 
faction — a faction which at a fatal moment had come 
into power through a triple division among the law- 
abiding citizens. 

These new rulers had chiefly distinguished themselves 
as the enemies of existing institutions — their political 
and social creed being, in effect, " Whatever is, is 
wrong." They were fond of execrating the Union as 
" a league with hell," and denouncing the Constitution 
as "a covenant with death." They derided the highest 
courts of the land as " crimping houses of iniquity," 
and villified the old flag as " a flaunting lie ! " 

But on coming into power they shamelessly shifted 
their ground, and started a war of conquest in pre- 
tended defense of the very principles and symbols 
which they had so bitterly reviled. 

And then, with bewildering logic, they began to 
mutilate the States on the plea that they were " in- 
destructible ;" they debarred them from the Union 
while declaring the Union to be " indissoluble," and 
they patched up and distorted the Constitution on the 
pretence that they were the only class who reverenced 
its "inviolability." Having thus approved themselves 
the only true champions of " the sacred principle of 



32 A Glance at Current American History. 

government by consent," they wound up their work 
by converting the States into satrapies, and holding 
them under bayonet rule until the conquered peoples 
consented to ratify the whole of their rump perform- 
ances. No wonder they are yearning for a historian 
of their own ! — no wonder they are drafting laws to 
give that historian sole control of the facts ! 

As for the South, she accepted war when no other 
recourse was left her. And she has borne its results, 
bitter tho they have been, with the serenity of forti- 
tude and the dignity of silence. Conscious of her 
rectitude in aim and deed, she has been willing to 
leave her cause to the tribunal of posterity. Like the 
princess in the Eastern story, she has held her course, 
unshaken by clamor, unmoved by taunts and sneers, 
and without a backward glance has swept on toward 
the Golden Fountain of the future. She has been con- 
tent to leave her name and memory "to men's chari- 
table speeches, to foreign nations and the next age." 
She frankly concedes that under the new Union, and 
the revised Constitution, and the improved laws, and 
the generally amended polity, there may have been 
innovations with which she has not kept pace, and 
which she does not fully comprehend. But when she 
is threatened with pains and penalties for presuming 
to relate to her own children the simple annals of her 
life, she believes that it is fairly within her right to 
enter a mild and respectful yet earnest protest. 



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